How Fat Loss Works

So the question that I'm answering today is how do we lose weight and how does it actually work?

Now, the information that I'm about to share is no secret, it's been out there for decades. And what really winds me up is that clubs, well, let's call them weight-watching clubs and slimming universe, you know who I'm talking about, they use the same principles but they hide it in their own points system, and they wrap it up in these complicated systems that you can only follow if you pay for their subscription.

And the problem with that is that it works for people until you stop paying, and then once you do stop paying, you can't work out exactly how to control your weight without paying for their points system, and it's all based around calories and the energy balance, okay?

So first off, when we're talking about weight loss, we're really talking about fat loss because your weight itself can fluctuate on a daily basis, depending on things like hydration levels in your cells. So we're actually talking about how to burn fat. Now, Energy Balance is the basic principle, and it's all around calories. So a calorie is a measurement of energy, as you know, and you'll find that on the back of every bit of food that you can buy from the supermarket.

You won't find Syns or points or whatever the hell other people use, you'll find calories. Now, your body takes these calories and it uses them as fuel. And if you don't burn enough, and you eat too many calories in a day, then your body can't get rid of them, so it stores them as fat in your cells. So it takes the excess energy, converts it to fat, and stores it in your cells, okay?

There's three stages to the energy balance.

So you've got maintenance mode: what we call your maintenance level. Which is when you're energy consumption, the amount of calories that you eat, is equal to the amount of calories that you burn in a day, and you're neither gonna gain fat or lose fat, so you sorta stay at the same weight. 

Then you've got what called a calorie surplus: which is when you eat far more calories in a day than your burn so your body stores the fat, and you start to gain fat and you gain weight. 

And then the other one is the calorie deficit: and that's what we wanna try and get into. So the calorie deficit is, obviously, when you eat less calories than you burn in a day. You burn more calories than you eat. And what happens there is that your body can't get energy from the food that you've eaten in that day, so it takes it from the fat stores, and it uses that as energy and starts burning fat.

Now, there's various different ways to get into a calorie deficit, and you've got to control the amount that the deficit is. If you start taking 1,000 calories a day out of your diet, you're gonna lose not just fat, you're gonna be unhealthy and you're gonna lose muscle mass, you're basically starving yourself and you're not gonna last very long doing a diet like that. That's why people yo-yo, they starve themselves for food, it works for a little while, they get fed up of being hungry and then they go back to eating exactly the same way as they were, and they start putting the weight on again.

So you got to control the amount that you're putting yourself into a deficit. There's various different ways of doing that so the other way that people do is they try and just go to the gym every day, and they go and beast themselves in the gym. But, again, what happens there is you're tired, you can get injured, you just lose momentum because nobody, or not very many people can sustain going to the gym every day and beasting themselves, and the same happens, you're eating exactly the same way and after a while you fall off the wagon and you go back into this cycle of yo-yoing your weight.

So what you need to do is you need to take a bit from either end, you need to reduce your calorie intake at the same time as increasing your activity, and it doesn't mean going to the gym all the time. Some people don't like the gym so it can just be your daily activity.

So it's adding any bit of exercise or activity into your day, whether that's taking the stairs, whether it's walking to the shops instead of taking the car, going for a walk in the afternoon. That plus gym is very healthy for you, but not everybody likes doing that straight off the bat.

So that's what you need to do, you need to find a balance between reducing your calorie intake and increasing your activity to create a perfect calorie deficit. Now, this is something that I do for my clients, and I would do all the calculations for them, and it's all tailored to their day and to their habits, their eating habits, their diet, which I teach them to change as well. You can do it yourself, and I've actually got a calculator on my website.

If you go to www.nutritionbodymind.com/tools, you'll find a link there to a calculator which will work out your calories for you. And then it's just a case of tracking.

Again, tracking your calories, there's various different ways of doing it, and it's something that I teach people in my eight-week course. 

Now, calorie tracking's got a bad name over the years. People say it's obsessive, people say it's a pain in the arse. But I mean we sit on our phones all day anyway, and it's as easy as scanning bar codes, it's as easy as tapping a number into a little app that we use, and it's not something you have to do all the time.

If you've got a few pounds you wanna lose, you track for a few weeks, you're done, that's it. And you educate yourself to get to a place where you know how much you need to eat and you know how much you need to move to sort of maintain your healthy weight.

So if you fancy giving it a go, like I say www.nutritionbodymind.com/tools and you'll find a link there to your calculator, and if you've got any questions, feel free to stick a comment below and

I'll see you in the next video.